Welcome to the first installment of The Micro Five. As I explained yesterday, the goal of The Micro Five is to restore purpose to the exercise of movie list-making by concentrating on, well, concentration. The rules: each list will be limited to five entries that direct follow from the established micro-topic. At the end of this list, I will tag five bloggers and/or Spout-ees who are invited to create their own list on the same topic. If I don't tag you but you'd still like to participate, post your response on your own blog (if you don't have one, you can start one for free at Spout) and paste a link to your entry in the comments on this post. At the end of the week, I'll revisit this post to compile their responses.
So, here we go: Five Improbable Werner Herzog Anecdotes. This topic was inspired by Patrick Goldstein's awesome Herzog profile in this weekend's LA Times. As Goldstein writes,
For Herzog, the borderline between fiction and reality is hazy at best. Facts, he says, are for accountants. He often tells stories that seem as hyperbolic as anything in his movies, beginning with the tale that his childhood was spent in a Bavarian village so remote that he didn't see a banana until he was 12.
What follows are my picks for the five best hyperbolic Herzog stories. I completely avoided the Kinski years, as well as anything resulting from Werner's collaborations with Harmony Korine, in order to give everybody else something to work with. In no particular order:
1) Werner Herzog Loves L.A.
Several scenes of Zak Penn's Herzog meta-joke Incident at Loch Ness take place in what is allegedly Werner Herzog's Hollywood Hills home. It all seems suspiciously ... beige. In the LA Times piece, Goldstein describes how Herzog settled into his comfortably banal, upper-middle-class lifestyle:
After years of traveling, [Herzog] and his wife, Lena a photographer who grew up in Siberia settled in Los Angeles in 2001. It marked the beginning of a love affair with this much-maligned city. "We lived for a while in San Francisco, but it was too chic and leisurely," Herzog explains. "New York is only a place to go if you're into finances. But we wanted a place of cultural substance. And if you look behind the stereotype of glitz and glamour, that is Los Angeles."
Herzog likes Los Angeles because, in his eyes, it is so un-chic, its treasures so unappreciated. "If you go to Florence, it has all surface beauty, but like Venice, it's simply a museum of Renaissance times. Los Angeles is raw, uncouth and bizarre, but it's a place of substance. It has more new horizons than any other place."
2) Werner Herzog Hypnotizes The Cast of Heart of Glass
In a 2003 interview with Keith Phipps for The Onion, Herzog explained why he felt the need to hypnotize the bulk of his cast each day before shooting this 1976 epic:
It's not a circus gimmick. I think the story of Heart Of Glass is the story of a village community that lapses into collective insanity. Or like sleepwalkers, entranced, walking into unforeseen disaster. And I thought for a long time, how would I stylize everyone like a sleepwalker? Then it occurred to me, "Why shouldn't they act under real hypnosis?" The question was, number one, could you hypnotize someone so deeply that he or she would open their eyes without waking up? Yes, that is possible. Second, can two people under hypnosis communicate with each other? Can they do dialogue? Yes, that is also possible. So I decided to do it under hypnosis. I had an idiot of a hypnotist who was into all sorts of New Age stuff, and I dismissed him after two sessions. I had to do it alone.
3) Werner Herzog Saves Joaquin Phoenix
In February 2006, newly-Oscar nominated actor Joaquin Phoenix wrecked his car whilst driving in the Hollywood Hills. Lying dazed in the wreckage immediately after the accident, Phoenix says he heard a tap on the window, followed by a German-accented voice. "Finally, I rolled down the window and this head pops inside. And he said, 'No, you're not [okay].' "And suddenly I said to myself, 'That's Werner Herzog!'" Phoenix wasn't critically injured, but Herzog prevented the situation from become much more serious. "The danger wasn't the accident, per se. It was the gasoline dripping from the car and the fact that Joaquin, then upside down, was nervously fumbling for a cigarette, an act I had to talk him out of," Herzog said. "Once I saw the gasoline, I thought the idea of him smoking would be a very bad idea."
4) Werner Herzog Jumped On a Cactus After Inadvertently Setting a Dwarf on Fire
Herzog shot his brilliant "freaks take over the asylum" allegory Even Dwarfs Started Small with a cast comprised entirely of "accident-prone dwarves." After once of the actors accidentally caught fire while shooting a scene (and survived), Herzog promised the cast that he would jump into a cactus if they all made it to the end of the shoot in piece:
A director should not be safe and sound behind the camera while the actors are feeling all alone out there, Herzog says. So I put on some goggles to protect my eyes and jumped from a ramp. And I can tell you that getting out is a lot more difficult than jumping in
The spines were the size of my fingers.
5) Werner Herzog Watches Mainstream Crap
In an interview with indieWIRE's Stephen Garrett, Herzog oft-handedly mentioned having just been to see the uber-mainstream Ashley Judd thriller, Double Jeopardy. When Garrett did a double-take. Herzog explained why he makes it a point to visit to multiplex every now and then:
I just do that to myself once and a while [laughs]. No, every so often I want to see what the industry is doing. I check it out. And, of course, I want to see what the overwhelming majority of audiences want to see on the screen. It's not about the bad taste of studio producers and the stupidity of the Hollywood industry - it is the overwhelming demand of an overwhelming majority worldwide that makes such films possible. And that's interesting for me, I'm fascinated by it. And I derive a lot of strength from it because even intelligent people like Janet Maslin label me the "Patron saint of eccentric filmmaking," or whatever; and when I see Double Jeopardy, I know that I'm not eccentric: I am the center. And all the filmmakers who make films like Double Jeopardy, they are the true eccentrics.
Okay, now for the fun part: I hereby tag the following bloggers to respond to this list with their own favorite Herzog anecdotes:
Nathaniel R at Film Experience
Ktincu at Spout
Indie Lauper
Philmography
Martha Fischer
On your marks, get set -- go make lists!
Originally posted on:
SpoutBlog